


Loyalties

by thedevilchicken



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Kidnapping, Manipulation, Older Man/Younger Woman, Power Dynamics, Rivalry, Sex, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-18 00:33:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13670565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Padmé and Dooku form an uneasy alliance, and the Rebellion rises.





	Loyalties

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).



> Set in an AU where Anakin turned earlier, Luke and Leia were consequently never born, and Padmé lived.

He doesn't trust her. 

Looking at the two of them, she supposes that makes sense. They're the unlikeliest of allies, from opposite sides of a war that's over but that neither one of them ever won. They didn't come together out of friendship. What binds them together is their common enemy; should they ever manage to defeat him, she's almost certain what comes next. 

But, for now, they share a side. 

And he doesn't trust her, but he doesn't have to. He doesn't have to because the fact is, they share everything. 

It wasn't always that way, of course - once upon a time, all they shared was mutual distaste for one another and, as they found later, an underhanded mentor from Naboo. They'd never occupied the same room, except as enemies. 

But, six years ago, that changed. 

\---

It started with what she supposed at the time was a Separatist attack, but when her ship was finally outmanoeuvred and then boarded and her two crewmen killed, she realized they were pirates. They took her and destroyed the emergency transmitter in her cruiser but she hoped they'd got a message out, even if all that she could do to find that out was wait. So, she waited. 

She waited. She couldn't be sure of how much time was passing but she knew it was, even if the pirates mostly left her by herself. She remembers how they bound her for what must have been hours at a time, alone in her cell in their base where they'd taken her. She remembers the cuffs biting at her wrists and ankles, how her shoulders ached until she cried out loud when they tied her arms just a little too high. She remembers the cold on her bare skin after they tore off her clothes and the drugs they fed her so she couldn't try to fight. 

They didn't touch her, not really, but she remembers their laughter in the air. Then she remembers their silence. She remembers the hum of a lightsaber. 

In her haze, her heart soared up as she thought maybe it was Anakin, but by then Anakin was gone. It wasn't Obi-Wan or Ahsoka, who he'd taken as his padawan after Anakin's turn. The lightsaber was red. The one who saved her was Count Dooku. 

"Senator," he said, as he extinguished his blade and released the locks at her restraints from the panel by the door. She was weak - who knew how much time had passed: a week? a month? She fell and he caught her and she spat at him, because she didn't even have it in her to raise her hand to strike him. 

He tutted and he wiped his face and then he wrapped her in his cloak. He carried her away. Not one person was left alive to try to stop him; she felt ashamed at how pleased that made her. 

When she woke, she thought she'd dreamt it all till he came into the room. Then she scowled and he looked at her disapprovingly as he held her head and helped her drink. She was too weak to even be suspicious of the water before she drifted off again. 

The next time she woke, there was a med droid in her room and her head felt a little clearer. The room itself was large and warm and comfortable, though windowless, and she knew she'd traded one cage for another, albeit then a gilded one. The med droid tended to her ankles and her wrists, cleaned and dressed them and apologized they had no bacta. Padmé, honestly, was just pleased to be alive. She found that she could live with scars rather than die without.

"How long have I been here?" she asked, her voice dry and broken. 

"I'm not programmed to know that," the med droid replied. "My chronometer was recently reset."

Padmé sighed. The droid left. She was alone again. 

Days passed, or she supposed they did. The droid brought her food and drink and helped her bathe and dress, brought her books to read to pass the time and helped her walk when she was strong enough, but every question that she asked was met with the same genre of response: the droid he'd sent, because he must have sent it, wasn't programmed to know. 

A week passed, or maybe more, and then the droid came in and said, "My master wishes to see you, Senator."

She followed down the corridor, the bare stone chilling her bare feet, her skin cold under her nightgown. She followed past a dozen empty rooms without a single window, then up a narrow, winding stair. Then there he was, in a room filled up with stark white moonlight. Her eyes stung with it. He turned to her. He frowned. He droid departed. 

"I can see I must give more direct instruction in future," he said, his hands tucked behind his back there at the fireplace. "I asked the droid to help you dress." 

"I _am_ dressed," she replied. 

"You might be clothed," he said, with a sardonic twist, "but I could hardly call you _dressed_."

She could feel her nipples hard against the thin white nightgown she was wearing, pressing to the fabric. She could feel his eyes on her, and hated that she blushed. 

He gestured to a chair there at the table; she sat, and so did he. He asked her to eat and so she did, contemplating how close she might press with the knife before he struck her down. The look on his face said he knew what she was thinking. She didn't try. 

The first night, they barely spoke before she returned down to her room. The second, he sent her clothes and she almost put on the nightgown once she'd washed instead, to spite him, but in the end she wore the dress. She assumed the lack of underclothes was intended to humiliate her; the droid said it was her fault - she'd just left them in the other room - but she didn't fetch them. When Padmé met the count for dinner, she wondered if he knew. She felt her cheeks turn hot. 

The third night, she left the underwear aside, sitting on the dresser in her room. It was petty, but she felt that choice at least was hers. 

The fourth night, they talked - she asked how long it was he intended to keep her, and he said till giving her up had most value to him. She didn't bother offering him credits as no doubt he had a store of those already, and she didn't offer power as she had very little of that left herself, the senate hobbled as it was by their new emperor. But she supposed if she just thought about it long enough, she'd find something else he wanted. 

"Are you pleased with how the war turned out?" she asked him on the fifth night. 

"I'd say I'm no more pleased than you are," he replied, and she thought what she could glean from that was this hadn't been his plan. 

"Were you aware that Palpatine would take control?" she asked him, on the sixth night. 

"I believe that was always his plan," he replied, and she thought what she could glean from that was that the count had known the emperor's plan. 

"Were you the master or the apprentice?" she asked him on the seventh night, her heart up in her throat. 

He smiled. "Now we're getting somewhere," he said. 

They spoke every night. She asked questions and he answered candidly, just one per meal as he refused a second, but she likes to think she used them well. Inside a fortnight, she believed she understood. 

"Now that he has Anakin," she said on the twelfth night, conversationally, "where does that leave you?" She didn't believe she needed to explain the workings of the Rule of Two to a Dark Lord of the Sith. 

"Waiting," he replied. 

"What for, exactly?"

He smiled and raised his fork and didn't answer, but Padmé understood. 

On the thirteenth night, she didn't ask a question. She sat at the table with her scarred wrists bare in the bright moonlight and said, calmly and quite levelly, "I want to bring back the Republic." 

He raised his brows, perhaps intrigued. "I don't," he replied. "I should think that was obvious." 

"It is." She cut the meat, precisely, her eyes trained studiously on it so they weren't on him. "But I know what you _do_ want."

"And what's that?"

She didn't look up. "Your master's head," she said. 

When he didn't reply, she was almost sure she had him. 

The fourteenth night, they talked politics; they talked about the war, and their two unique places in it, and everything the end of it had brought about for their two opposing sides. The fifteenth night, they talked about Anakin; they talked about her marriage, his betrayal, and how he had usurped Count Dooku's place. 

"So take his instead," she told him, hotly, and she stood and left, with the moonlight in shadows through the thin fabric of her dress. She knew what she meant, and exactly how it sounded. It was a calculated move. 

The sixteenth night, she stood up by the window, looking out. She hadn't left the palace since she'd arrived perhaps a month before, but the surface outside was barren, cold, all icy peaks and windswept plains with a moon that shone more brightly than its pale, far-away sun. Perhaps she could have left the castle with its lonely room that peeked out of the mountainside and still lived out there, but she hadn't left, and not just because she knew her message hadn't been received. She hadn't tried to leave because she now had other plans. 

She unclasped her dress and let it drop down where she stood, and she ate her dinner naked in the moonlight with his eyes on her. When she left, his eyes strayed over her. She left the dress where it was by the window. 

"You were a Jedi once," she said, on the seventeenth night, as she stood naked at the window. She glanced back over her shoulder to where he was sitting, at the table, and her long braid brushed her back. "What's true, isn't it?"

He stood. He left the table and he made his way across the room to her, the click of the heels of his high leather boots against the flagstone floor a little louder than she had imagined. She turned back to the window. He stepped close behind her. 

"Was I a Jedi?" he said, then he bent close by her ear. 

" _Yes_ ," he said, the depth and timbre of his voice making her shiver. "But no longer." And he lingered one long moment more, but then he stepped away. 

On the eighteenth night, he unclasped the dress from her shoulders with the Force; she slapped him hard across the face, and he laughed and left her there. 

On the nineteenth night, she pushed him down onto his chair and she straddled his thighs. He watched her pinch her nipples as she talked to him about rebellion. She pretended not to notice how his cock stiffened hard inside his robes. She pretended not to know that she was playing with fire. 

The twentieth night, she straddled his lap and she pleasured herself, biting her lip as she came. He watched; it seemed quite like he couldn't look away. 

The twenty-first night, she slipped her fingers down between her thighs as she stood by herself at the window. She could feel his presence though he didn't leave the table, when she hitched up one knee and unseen fingers pushed inside. 

The twenty-second night, she wrapped her hands around his throat and said he was a coward if all that he would do was hide. So he pushed her down onto the table and he held her there, wrist and ankle, with the Force. He spread her legs. When his deft tongue met her cunt, she was already wet and waiting. She didn't say another word. 

The twenty-third night, she called him a coward. He held her up in the air like a mannequin with strong tendrils of the Force, her thighs spread wide, while he fucked her with his fingers. 

The twenty-fourth night, she called him a coward. He pushed her up face-first against the window and he fucked her with his fingers till she pushed against them, till she came, and so did he. She felt it, through his robes, at the small of her back. She tried to tell herself that was a victory. 

And on the twenty-fifth night she said, "Don't you think we have a job to do?"

"I do," he replied, but he pushed her down anyway, on her back on the cold flagstone floor. He knelt between her thighs and freed his cock, long and thick and flushed and hard, veined and moist just at the tip. He stroked himself, teasing back his foreskin. Padmé hated that she wanted it inside her, but she did. 

He spread her cunt wide open with one hand and shoved his thick, hot cock inside her, still kneeling, sitting on his heels. Then he rubbed her clit with the pad of his thumb, made her moan, made her tremble, made her squeeze around his length as he gritted his teeth, as he grimaced. He shifted his hips; she came as he fucked her, then again, then _again_ , till he hissed in a breath and he came in her. 

"You can be quite persuasive, Senator," he said, unsteady, still hard and still inside her, and still very nearly fully clothed. 

"We want the same thing, Count," she replied. 

"And what's that?"

She looked him in the eye. "Resolution," she said. 

On the twenty-sixth night, she sent a message offworld to Bail Organa. He was shocked to find her living when they'd all presumed her dead, but he heard the things she said. He didn't understand why Dooku was beside her. By the time their call ended, she'd made him understand. 

On the twenty-seventh night, the Rebellion was born. 

It already had its leaders. 

\---

He still uses the red lightsaber. 

When Palpatine triggered Order 66, the clones very nearly killed off all the Jedi; now, what's left of them is a handful out of hundreds. What's left is Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka Tano, Plo Koon and Luminara Unduli, six padawans whose masters died protecting them and three younglings who hadn't even had a chance to make a saber of their own. Padmé is half convinced that one day, Dooku will be the one who shows them how. 

Dooku still uses the red lightsaber, though the Jedi all object to it. He knows it angers them because of what it represents. Padmé knows he doesn't care. 

Today, he and Obi-Wan stood flanking her in their transmission, bathing herin red and blue light from their two sabers. It made a point, she thinks - Republicans and Separatists alike have both allied with them in the years since the start. They have common ground, as they all want the Empire's failure. 

And now, in private, behind their closed doors in their base, in Dooku's hidden palace, Padmé lets down her hair and she undresses. He helps her. The ornate Naboo gowns she wears on air always require a helping hand or two. He seems happy to oblige. 

He doesn't trust her and she knows that, but he doesn't have to. They share everything - every message and communique will only open to the two of them together. Each conversation is in both of their presence or it's not at all. They eat together. They read together. They address their troops together. And, at the end of the day, they sleep in the same bed. 

At the end of the day, they strip to their skin and he puts his hands on her. He fucks her. She lets him. Sometimes, she even likes it. 

"Why is he with us?" Obi-Wan once asked her, though Dooku was right there just like he always is. She told him the count was important to the cause, because he is. She didn't say it was the only way she knew to make him free her. She doesn't say sometimes she wonders if he ever really did at all. 

Six years ago, Padmé Amidala was kidnapped on her way home to Naboo. When Dooku killed her captors, she's not sure if that was silencing or retribution; all she knows is he puts his hands over her scars when he has her. All she knows is the truth of it is not important. She tells herself all of this is a means to an end. 

"You were excellent tonight," he says, as he rubs the head of his cock between her thighs, over her clit, against her lips. "I have thoughts for our next address." And he pushes in, abrupt, right to the hilt. She gasps and wraps her legs around his waist. 

He doesn't trust her, but he doesn't have to. Because she doesn't trust him, either. 

And one day, when the Empire falls, she'll find out where his loyalties really lie.


End file.
